Diffusion models achieve high-quality image generation but are limited by slow iterative sampling. Distillation methods alleviate this by enabling one- or few-step generation. Flow matching, originally introduced as a distinct framework, has since been shown to be theoretically equivalent to diffusion under Gaussian assumptions, raising the question of whether distillation techniques such as score distillation transfer directly. We provide a simple derivation -- based on Bayes' rule and conditional expectations -- that unifies Gaussian diffusion and flow matching without relying on ODE/SDE formulations. Building on this view, we extend Score identity Distillation (SiD) to pretrained text-to-image flow-matching models, including SANA, SD3-Medium, SD3.5-Medium/Large, and FLUX.1-dev, all with DiT backbones. Experiments show that, with only modest flow-matching- and DiT-specific adjustments, SiD works out of the box across these models, in both data-free and data-aided settings, without requiring teacher finetuning or architectural changes. This provides the first systematic evidence that score distillation applies broadly to text-to-image flow matching models, resolving prior concerns about stability and soundness and unifying acceleration techniques across diffusion- and flow-based generators. A project page is available at https://yigu1008.github.io/SiD-DiT.

Diffusion models like Stable Diffusion (SD) drive a vibrant open-source ecosystem including fully fine-tuned checkpoints and parameter-efficient adapters such as LoRA, LyCORIS, and ControlNet. However, these adaptation components are tightly coupled to a specific base model, making them difficult to reuse when the base model is upgraded (e.g., from SD 1.x to 2.x) due to substantial changes in model parameters and architecture. In this work, we propose Delta Sampling (DS), a novel method that enables knowledge transfer across base models with different architectures, without requiring access to the original training data. DS operates entirely at inference time by leveraging the delta: the difference in model predictions before and after the adaptation of a base model. This delta is then used to guide the denoising process of a new base model. We evaluate DS across various SD versions, demonstrating that DS achieves consistent improvements in creating desired effects (e.g., visual styles, semantic concepts, and structures) under different sampling strategies. These results highlight DS as an effective, plug-and-play mechanism for knowledge transfer in diffusion-based image synthesis. Code:~ https://github.com/Zhidong-Gao/DeltaSampling

Recently, large vision-language models (LVLMs) have emerged as the preferred tools for judging text-image alignment, yet their robustness along the visual modality remains underexplored. This work is the first study to address a key research question: Can adversarial visual manipulations systematically fool LVLM judges into assigning unfairly inflated scores? We define potential image induced biases within the context of T2I evaluation and examine how these biases affect the evaluations of LVLM judges. Moreover, we introduce a novel, fine-grained, multi-domain meta-evaluation benchmark named FRAME, which is deliberately constructed to exhibit diverse score distributions. By introducing the defined biases into the benchmark, we reveal that all tested LVLM judges exhibit vulnerability across all domains, consistently inflating scores for manipulated images. Further analysis reveals that combining multiple biases amplifies their effects, and pairwise evaluations are similarly susceptible. Moreover, we observe that visual biases persist under prompt-based mitigation strategies, highlighting the vulnerability of current LVLM evaluation systems and underscoring the urgent need for more robust LVLM judges.

Research on how the popularization of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools impacts learning environments has led to hesitancy among educators to teach these tools in classrooms, creating two observed disconnects. Generative AI competency is increasingly valued in industry but not in higher education, and students are experimenting with generative AI without formal guidance. The authors argue students across fields must be taught to responsibly and expertly harness the potential of AI tools to ensure job market readiness and positive outcomes. Computer Science trajectories are particularly impacted, and while consistently top ranked U.S. Computer Science departments teach the mechanisms and frameworks underlying AI, few appear to offer courses on applications for existing generative AI tools. A course was developed at a private research university to teach undergraduate and graduate Computer Science students applications for generative AI tools in software development. Two mixed method surveys indicated students overwhelmingly found the course valuable and effective. Co-authored by the instructor and one of the graduate students, this paper explores the context, implementation, and impact of the course through data analysis and reflections from both perspectives. It additionally offers recommendations for replication in and beyond Computer Science departments. This is the extended version of this paper to include technical appendices.

One-step generators distilled from Masked Diffusion Models (MDMs) compress multiple sampling steps into a single forward pass, enabling efficient text and image synthesis. However, they suffer two key limitations: they inherit modeling bias from the teacher, and their discrete token outputs block gradient flow, preventing post-distillation refinements such as adversarial training, reward-based fine-tuning, and Test-Time Embedding Optimization (TTEO). In this work, we introduce soft embeddings, a simple relaxation that replaces discrete tokens with the expected embeddings under the generator's output distribution. Soft embeddings preserve representation fidelity for one-step discrete generator while providing a fully differentiable continuous surrogate that is compatible with teacher backbones and tokenizer decoders. Integrating soft embeddings into the Di[M]O distillation framework (denoted Soft-Di[M]O) makes one-step generators end-to-end trainable and enables straightforward application of GAN-based refinement, differentiable reward fine-tuning, and TTEO. Empirically, across multiple MDM teachers (e.g., MaskBit, MaskGen), Soft-Di[M]O achieves state-of-the-art one-step results: improved class-to-image performance, a one-step FID of 1.56 on ImageNet-256 with GAN-based refinement, along with higher GenEval and HPS scores on text-to-image with reward fine-tuning, and further gains from TTEO.

Despite their wide-spread success, Text-to-Image models (T2I) still struggle to produce images that are both aesthetically pleasing and faithful to the user's input text. We introduce DreamSync, a model-agnostic training algorithm by design that improves T2I models to be faithful to the text input. DreamSync builds off a recent insight from TIFA's evaluation framework -- that large vision-language models (VLMs) can effectively identify the fine-grained discrepancies between generated images and the text inputs. DreamSync uses this insight to train T2I models without any labeled data; it improves T2I models using its own generations. First, it prompts the model to generate several candidate images for a given input text. Then, it uses two VLMs to select the best generation: a Visual Question Answering model that measures the alignment of generated images to the text, and another that measures the generation's aesthetic quality. After selection, we use LoRA to iteratively finetune the T2I model to guide its generation towards the selected best generations. DreamSync does not need any additional human annotation. model architecture changes, or reinforcement learning. Despite its simplicity, DreamSync improves both the semantic alignment and aesthetic appeal of two diffusion-based T2I models, evidenced by multiple benchmarks (+1.7% on TIFA, +2.9% on DSG1K, +3.4% on VILA aesthetic) and human evaluation.

Text-to-image diffusion models can create stunning images from natural language descriptions that rival the work of professional artists and photographers. However, these models are large, with complex network architectures and tens of denoising iterations, making them computationally expensive and slow to run. As a result, high-end GPUs and cloud-based inference are required to run diffusion models at scale. This is costly and has privacy implications, especially when user data is sent to a third party. To overcome these challenges, we present a generic approach that, for the first time, unlocks running text-to-image diffusion models on mobile devices in less than $2$ seconds. We achieve so by introducing efficient network architecture and improving step distillation. Specifically, we propose an efficient UNet by identifying the redundancy of the original model and reducing the computation of the image decoder via data distillation. Further, we enhance the step distillation by exploring training strategies and introducing regularization from classifier-free guidance. Our extensive experiments on MS-COCO show that our model with $8$ denoising steps achieves better FID and CLIP scores than Stable Diffusion v$1.5$ with $50$ steps. Our work democratizes content creation by bringing powerful text-to-image diffusion models to the hands of users.

Deep neural networks often rely on spurious correlations to make predictions, which hinders generalization beyond training environments. For instance, models that associate cats with bed backgrounds can fail to predict the existence of cats in other environments without beds. Mitigating spurious correlations is crucial in building trustworthy models. However, the existing works lack transparency to offer insights into the mitigation process. In this work, we propose an interpretable framework, Discover and Cure (DISC), to tackle the issue. With human-interpretable concepts, DISC iteratively 1) discovers unstable concepts across different environments as spurious attributes, then 2) intervenes on the training data using the discovered concepts to reduce spurious correlation. Across systematic experiments, DISC provides superior generalization ability and interpretability than the existing approaches. Specifically, it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on an object recognition task and a skin-lesion classification task by 7.5% and 9.6%, respectively. Additionally, we offer theoretical analysis and guarantees to understand the benefits of models trained by DISC. Code and data are available at https://github.com/Wuyxin/DISC.

We introduce a large scale crowdsourced text adventure game as a research platform for studying grounded dialogue. In it, agents can perceive, emote, and act whilst conducting dialogue with other agents. Models and humans can both act as characters within the game. We describe the results of training state-of-the-art generative and retrieval models in this setting. We show that in addition to using past dialogue, these models are able to effectively use the state of the underlying world to condition their predictions. In particular, we show that grounding on the details of the local environment, including location descriptions, and the objects (and their affordances) and characters (and their previous actions) present within it allows better predictions of agent behavior and dialogue. We analyze the ingredients necessary for successful grounding in this setting, and how each of these factors relate to agents that can talk and act successfully.